Enterprise information systems are increasingly being conceived as a combination of existing systems and to work as a part of an ecosystem of software products. This change demands methods and tools to deal with the challenging semantic interoperability issues. OntoUML is a well-founded modeling language that allows modelers to formalize world-views in a technologically neutral way, aiding in the solution of such interoperability challenges. In this paper, we present an overview of the OntoUML Lightweight Editor (OLED), our model-based environment to build, evaluate and implement OntoUML models, alongside with its main features and application scenarios.

In competitive markets, companies need well-designed business strategies if they seek to grow and obtain sustainable competitive advantage. At the core of a successful business strategy there is a carefully crafted value proposition, which ultimately defines what a company delivers to its customers. Despite their widely recognized importance, there is however little agreement on what exactly value propositions are. This lack of conceptual clarity harms the communication among stakeholders and the harmonization of current business strategy theories and strategy support frameworks. Furthermore, it hinders the development of systematic methodologies for crafting value propositions, as well as adequate support for representing and analyzing them. In this paper, we present an ontological analysis of value propositions based on a review of most relevant business and marketing theories and on previous work on value ascription, grounded in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). Our investigation clarifies how value propositions are different from value presentations, and shows the difference between value propositions at the business level from those related to specific offerings.

A sharing platform is a digital platform that facilitates access to underutilized goods by renting or lending them to others. Users become less dependent on ownership which improves efficiency, sustainability, and the sense of community. The Sharing Economy (SE) is considered a complex domain because value co-creation can occur between multiple types of platform users. Developing platform software that offers the right functionality for the intended digital platform is therefore challenging. To address this complexity, an ontology can be utilized, which is an explicit specification of a conceptualization that provides a controlled vocabulary and shared meaning regarding a domain. The use of a sharing platform ontology allows for more effective communication and knowledge sharing amongst stakeholders in platform development and eventually drives the platform software development process. However, currently, it is not known how to develop such an ontology. In previous research, we developed the Digital Platform Ontology (DPO) and an extension of the DPO for describing platform business model choices. The DPO describes the digital platform domain in terms of digital platform types, including sharing platforms. However, a method to use the DPO and its business model extension for developing an organization-specific ontology that describes the functionality and business model of a specific existing or intended sharing platform was lacking. In this paper, we develop such a method using the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) and demonstrate it using a proof-of-concept based on the BlaBlaCar and Couchsurfing platforms.